The present disclosure relates to a pre-5th-Generation (5G) or 5G communication system being developed to meet the growing demand for high speed data services, support ultra-reliability and low latency applications and support massive machine type communication beyond 4th-Generation (4G) communication system such as Long Term Evolution (LTE).
In order to meet the demand of exponentially increasing data traffic and new services, efforts are being made to develop an improved 5G or pre-5G communication system. Therefore, the 5G or pre-5G communication system is also called a ‘Beyond 4G Network’ or a ‘Post LTE System’ or ‘Next generation of International Mobile Telecommunication (IMT)-Advanced’ or IMT-2020 system.
The 5G communication system is expected to operate not only in lower frequency bands e.g. 700 MHz to 6 GHz but also operate in higher frequency (mmWave) bands, e.g. 10 GHz to 100 GHz bands, so as to accomplish higher data rates. In order to mitigate propagation loss of the radio waves and increase the transmission distance, the beamforming, massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO), Full Dimensional MIMO (FD-MIMO), array antenna, an analog beam forming, large scale antenna techniques are discussed in the 5G communication system.
In addition, in 5G communication systems, development for system network improvement is under way based on advanced small cells, cloud Radio Access Networks (RANs), ultra-dense networks, Device-to-Device (D2D) communication, wireless backhaul, moving network based on mobile relay, cooperative communication, Coordinated Multi-Points (CoMP), reception-end interference cancellation and the like.
In the 5G communication system, Hybrid FSK and QAM Modulation (FQAM) and Sliding Window Superposition Coding (SWSC) as an Advanced Coding Modulation (ACM), and Filter Bank Multi Carrier (FBMC), Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA), and Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) as an advanced access technology have been developed.
In addition, the next generation wireless system is expected to address different use cases having quite different requirements in terms of data rate, latency, reliability, mobility etc. However, it is expected that the design of the air-interface of the next generation would be flexible enough to serve the UEs having quite different capabilities depending on the use case and market segment the UE cater service to the end customer. Few example use cases the next generation wireless system is expected to address is enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), massive Machine Type Communication (m-MTC), ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLL) etc. The eMBB requirements like tens of Gbps data rate, low latency, high mobility so on and so forth address the market segment representing the conventional wireless broadband subscribers needing internet connectivity everywhere, all the time and on the go. The m-MTC requirements like very high connection density, infrequent data transmission, very long battery life, low mobility address so on and so forth address the market segment representing the Internet of Things (IoT)/Internet of Everything (IoE) envisioning connectivity of billions of devices. The URLL requirements like very low latency, very high reliability and variable mobility so on and so forth address the market segment representing the Industrial automation application, vehicle-to-vehicle/vehicle-to-infrastructure communication foreseen as one of the enabler for an autonomous vehicle.
Further, a physical layer of wireless cellular system in both Downlink (DL) and Uplink (UL) operating in mmWave/cmWave would be based on new air-interface different from that of IMT-Advanced air-interface to meet the challenging requirements and providing enhanced mobile broadband user experience. Next generation IMT-Advanced wireless cellular system is expected to deliver several 100 Mbps to a few tens of Gbps user experienced data rates in comparison to wireless systems based on IMT-Advanced. These very high data rates need to be available ubiquitously across the coverage area.
Further, apart from user experienced data rates next generation of wireless cellular system is expected to deliver on other requirements like peak data rate (few 10 of Gbps), reduced latency (down to 1 ms), better spectral efficiency compared to IMT-Advanced system and many other requirements. The next generation of wireless cellular system is foreseen to be deployed in higher frequency bands above 6 GHz (e.g. 10 GHz˜100 GHz, also called mmWave and/or cmWave) due to availability of large amount of spectrum bandwidths. In the initial phase of deployment next generation of wireless cellular system is expected to be deployed in lower frequency bands below 6 GHz using spectrum farming techniques.
Further, one of the requirements for next generation RAT is energy efficiency; so the design of system information provisioning needs to address the energy efficiency requirement to minimize always ON periodic broadcast. Another aspect related to broadcasting of system information is high signaling overhead in the context of NR operation in higher frequency bands (above 6 GHz) where DL beam sweeping operation is inevitable to reach the coverage area of the cell. Broadcasting all the system information on the coverage beams which are subject to DL beam sweeping may lead to excessive signaling overhead. Therefore, another design criterion for system information provisioning needs to address the signaling overhead aspect.
Another aspect related to broadcasting of system information using DL beam sweeping is restrictive and inflexible scheduling. The transmission resources remaining after resources consumed by system information may be only used for data scheduling for a user in the direction of the DL coverage beam. Therefore, if more time/frequency resources are consumed by system information then user data scheduling becomes restrictive and inflexible. For the sake of illustration of disclosed methods for acquisition of system information by a User Equipment (UE) on demand it is assumed the air-interface of next generation wireless cellular system would be based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple-access (OFDMA) Radio Access Technology (RAT) in DL and UL. However the numerology (i.e. OFDM symbol duration, carrier spacing etc) of next generation RAT can be different from the OFDMA numerology of IMT-Advanced system.
The above information is presented as background information only to help the reader to understand the present invention. Applicants have made no determination and make no assertion as to whether any of the above might be applicable as prior art with regard to the present application.